The invention relates to the field of aircraft copy display systems and in particular to aircraft flight data display systems that can visually display flight data directly from an aircraft flight data recorder.
Most of the commercial aircraft flying today are equipped with flight data recorders for recording various aircraft flight parameters such as altitude, airspeed, heading and engine data. The primary purpose for recording aircraft flight data is to provide flight data for accident analysis but the flight data recorded on the aircraft has also proven useful to airline management for other purposes including aircraft maintenance and incident analysis such as a landing approach resulting in a hard landing or a go-around. With the advent of modern digital flight data recorders that are capable of storing over a hundred different flight parameters, the usefulness of the data to the airline operating and maintenance personnel has expanded dramatically. The availability of a large number of flight parameters has made possible significant improvements in the safety as well as economics of flight operations by permitting management to analyze actual flight data. However, in order to be useful, this data must be made available to management in a timely manner and in useful formats.
A review of the prior art methods for producing aircraft flight data from a flight data recorder for analysis by airline personnel has revealed a number of significant disadvantages in these methods. Typically the data from the digital flight data recorder, which is stored in bit serial form, has to be converted into a format that can be used as input to a large mainframe computer system. After the data from the digital flight data recorder is reformatted, the mainframe computer system converts the data into the appropriate engineering units and this data is then printed out in tabular form or plotted for analysis. This process has several disadvantages one of which is a substantial delay in making the data available. For example reformatting or transcribing the data typically takes several hours and further delays often occur because the transcription equipment is remote from the location of the large mainframe computer. Also it has been found that the use of the company base computer can lead to priority problems where the data conversion and tabulation processes quite often have to compete with other business functions of the machine resulting in further delays.
Along with the delays in making the data available, a further disadvantage of the current procedure results from the fact that large quantities of computer printout are produced requiring extensive engineering time to examine and analyze. Thus the processes historically used by airline management to obtain flight data lacks the flexibility to present timely data in a form that would be most useful to operating and engineering personnel.
One form of flight data display that has been determined to be quite useful is cockpit animation where the flight data can be viewed on a simulated cockpit instrument panel as discussed in a paper presented at the ISASI Annual Seminar, September 1979, entitled "The Challenges of Digital Flight Data Recorder Readout and Analysis" by B. Caiger. This paper discusses cockpit animation from an accident analysis standpoint, but it has been discovered that this type of display also has advantages to airline management. For example this format is particularly useful in reviewing incidents with pilots who are used to evaluating flight data in a cockpit environment. However, as pointed out above, to be useful to operating management, flight data must be made available on a timely and convenient basis.